From Birthers to 9/11 Truthers, conspiracy theories are all the rage these …

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It was July of 2009. The economy was on the edge of collapse, with 467,000 jobs lost the previous month. The unemployment rate was 9.5 percent. But for thousands of Americans, the real crisis was a dark secret that the government was supposedly hiding: President Obama wasn't born in the United States.

"Will you keep the Republic, or will you allow it to be stolen from us because of apathy?" asked one "birther" brochure. "Demand that Barak [sp] Obama prove he is a Natural Born American. The burden is on him to prove, but the burden is on you to demand the proof."

This was nonsense, of course. Obama was born on August 1, 1961 in the State of Hawaii. HIs campaign even released his certificate of live birth, and announcements of the event appeared in local newspapers at the time. But that didn't matter.

"Nothing will assuage them," an exasperated White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters in a press conference that month, saying that Obama's citizenship had been "proven ad nauseum."

"Why does this keep coming up?" a reporter asked.

"Because for 15 dollars you can get an Internet address and say whatever you want," Gibbs shot back.

Gibbs: "For 15 dollars you can get an Internet address and say whatever you want."

Ditto, declared Gawker. "Barack Obama is eligible to be the president," the site declared. "It's that simple. Unless you're in America's fastest-growing group of nuts with modems, the Birthers!"

A threatened legacy

This particular tempest in a digital teapot has mostly faded. But as everyone who has ever heard the phrase "9/11 Truth" knows, the fringe background autoflow is always churning, waiting to uncover the next sinister plot.

But is the assumption behind Gibbs' and Gawker's commentaries true? Does the ease with which the Internet allows ordinary people to publish and share material exponentially magnify conspiracy scenarios? Or, to put it more crudely, does the 'Net mean that crackpots have never had it so good? Actually, they've done pretty well for at least a century.

"One of the legacies of the European Enlightenment is a scientific methodology that allows us to make increasingly accurate observations about the world around us," observes Damien Thompson in his book Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History.

"That legacy is now threatened," Thomas warns. "And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information."

The paradox that Thomas describes is real. But since reading David Aaronovitch's equally compelling Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, I think that the answer to the question is more complex.

Malignant lunacy

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, conspiracy theories—bogus sinister, secretive plots against society or famous people—have not been produced by the downtrodden, uneducated, and ignorant. Quite the contrary; most "originate and are largely circulated among the educated and the middle class," Aaronovitch writes. "It has typically been the professors, the university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies."

These elaborate yarns invariably marinate in a veneer of erudition, he notes:

The approach has been described as death by footnote. Accompanying the exposition of a theory is a dense mass of detailed and often undifferentiated information, but laid out as an academic text. Often the theory is also supported by quotations from non-conspiracist sources that almost invariably turn out to be misleading and selective.

No example of this is more obvious than one of the ugliest conspiracy theories of them all: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. An eighty-page document outlining an alleged Jewish plot to take over the globe, a German edition of the text insisted that The Protocols were first outlined at the first World Zionist Conference of 1897.

The prose surfaced in various books and reprints through the early 20-century, but really caught on after World War I. The European public sought someone to blame for the Russian Revolution. Germans longed for a scapegoat to explain their defeat. Americans bitter about US involvement in the conflict were also looking for answers. Here was an easily digestible artifact that satisfied all needs.

And so in 1920 a private British commission reprinted The Protocols in a book titled The Jewish Peril. "Have we escaped a 'Pax Germanica' only to fall into a 'Pax Judaeica'?" asked The Times of London in an editorial review of the document. The Tory Morning Post followed, publishing no less than 23 articles on the book. At around the same time the Philadelphia Public Ledger reviewed the text, its veracity endorsed by the Christian Science Monitor, then widely publicized by auto maker Henry Ford in his bestselling polemic, The International Jew.

But then a German academic made a discovery—an anti-semitic novel published in 1868 that bore a remarkable resemblance to The Protocols, creatively reworked by French and Russian authors through the late nineteenth century. Next a Times writer found a book about French politics published in the 1870s that was pretty much the mysterious essay word-for-word, sans any reference to Jews.

"A malignant lunacy," The Spectator now called the alleged conspiracy. But it was too late. There was no Internet in 1921, but The Protocols of the Elders of Zion went viral nonetheless, embraced by the Nazis in the 1930s. It has been promoted by adherents ever since.

The need to believe

Long before the emergence of the 'Net, conspiracy theories became part of middle class life. Liberals and leftists in the 1930s, desperate to believe in the Soviet Union, defended Stalin's insistence that the exiled Leon Trotsky had convinced a cabal of old Bolsheviks to overthrow his regime, necessitating their show trial executions. American isolationists, furious over US entry into World War II, glommed onto theories that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan and concealed information about the attack on Pearl Harbor from his commanders.

And Republicans in the early 1950s, bitter over losing the White House to Harry Truman in 1948, embraced Joe McCarthy's thesis that Communist influence in the government had helped the US "lose" China to Mao Zedong in 1949.

In this millennium's first decade, such outsider pain was evident in anti-war Democrats who embraced "9/11 Truth" conspiracies. The luminaries of this movement insist that the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was the the product of a "controlled demolition," and some doubt that a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon. From these theories often flow the extrapolation that President Bush and Vice President Cheney knew about the plot and let it happen, or even executed the terrible crime themselves.

"The only way we're going to get Bush is to nail him on 9/11," I heard someone proclaim at a public forum in San Francisco in 2003. By then I had become accustomed to such comments. It was as if the need to defeat the President and the inability to envision doing it through politics required the exploration of these scenarios, even if they were not provable.

People will discredit us

Out of this atmosphere of alarm and despair emerged what is probably the most viral conspiracy piece of the Internet age: Loose Change, a video that serves up the "inside job" perspective on 9/11. The documentary has been widely criticized as dependent on sloppy, cherry-picked evidence.

"We don't ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 per cent," the producer conceded in a 2006 interview. "We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves—the B52 [remarked to have flown into the Empire State Building], the use of Wikipedia, things like that. We left them in there so people will want to discredit us and go out and research the events yourself and come up with your own conclusions."

Has the Internet facilitated this sort of dubious fare? Of course. By now, Loose Change may have been viewed on YouTube over 100 million times. But no one would take these theories seriously if they didn't serve larger purposes—giving the marginal their moment on the big stage, or consoling the defeated with histories suggesting that their downfall came not via happenstance but by the foul play of a ruthless, omnipresent giant.

Screw Loose Change, Not Freakin' Again edition

"Seen in this way," Aaronovitch adds, "conspiracy theories are actually reassuring. They suggest that there is an explanation, that human agencies are powerful, and that there is order rather than chaos. This makes redemption possible."

The good news is that the 'Net also offers level-headed people a chance to challenge these claims and quickly expose their inaccuracies, as we saw with the response blog Screw Loose Change. Fact-checking sites like Snopes and counterknowledge.com also play a role. The Internet has made publishing easier for everyone, the cranks and the skeptics alike.

But don't blame cyberspace for the existence of Birthers and Truthers. Nobody forces us to read the writings or to believe the words of the conspiracy theorists; no, we chose to do that long before anyone could buy a domain name for 15 bucks.

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Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar